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May There Always Be a Dialog

Our best minds have pondered the question of individual responsibility and group accountability for millennia.

The Buddhist approach is partly to remove one’s self, metaphorically or physically, from the artifice of the daily stress cycle to contemplate what is really important and what can be done to achieve it. Happiness or contentedness is part of that equation …

The socio-political approach is to categorize and classify everything and all the players into neat little artificial groups, and assign goals to each. This has the advantage of presupposing the experiment-designers have some knowledge of which values can properly give rise to those goals, and the safety of insulating us from having to account for the pesky, unpredictable individual. As I once wrote in an essay I called “Black Elk Speaks” (yes, concerning Niehardt’s book):

“The thought occurs that it would be a bad thing to try to needlessly integrate the vision of Black Elk with my own, or into our present circumstances in the United States. There is a certain value and dignity in keeping these things separate from each other in understanding, for they are different experiences and have their meaning in different worlds. The Western rush to explain everything in terms of other things which are also not truly grasped leaves a vacuum, the filling of which is only approximated by art.”

Tribalism and elitism seem to go hand in hand with each other, and with the racial, ethnic, economic and other minority divides you observe. We have done a better job of breaking down elitism, in an average decade, than most other countries did over their centuries. We all just have a long way to go.

The answer will never come from one individual like you or me, nor even from some great future prophet. Humanity needs to evolve, and our particular “in” with evolution is education, as it has been for 100,000 years, and I don’t just mean science and math, either. 🙂 That will make us or break us, particularly the 🙂 part. It is not the sound of just the one right butterfly, it is the sound of them all taking off by the hundreds of thousands into the wind.

If you remember the TV commercial about cowboys driving huge herds of cats, ponder for a moment how one herds a cloud of butterflies, and you’ll have our answer.